More than three years after the emergence of generative AI, AI-assisted coding remains by far the most popular and lucrative use case for the technology.
Although multiple companies — including Anthropic, maker of Claude Code, as well as Cursor and Cognition — are already vying for dominance, investors believe there is room for at least one more player.
On Wednesday, Factory, a startup developing AI agents for enterprise engineering teams, announced it had raised $150 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, and Blackstone. Keith Rabois, a managing director at Khosla Ventures, joined the startup’s board.
Factory founder Matan Grinberg told the Wall Street Journal that the company’s key differentiator is its ability to switch between different foundation models, such as Anthropic’s Claude or Chinese AI startup DeepSeek. However, startups like Cursor also don’t rely on a single model to generate code.
Factory’s customers include engineering teams at Morgan Stanley, Ernst & Young, and Palo Alto Networks.
The startup was founded in 2023 after Grinberg, then a PhD student at UC Berkeley, cold-emailed Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire. The two bonded over mutual academic interest. (Maguire’s PhD from Caltech is in the same area of physics Grinberg was studying.)
Maguire convinced Grinberg to drop out and launch Factory, with Sequoia backing the startup at the seed stage.
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